After having been recommended this film by more than a few people whose opinions I hold in high regard, I managed to watch it one night recently with Margaret and Shawn. All’s I have to say is, go out and rent this movie at your earliest convenience. It’s an absolute hoot. And that’s the troot.

Written and directed by Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill fame), this is a speculative look at America 500 years in the future. The current trend of smarter, more successful Americans having fewer children than poorer, less intelligent citizens has played out to its predictable and all-too-scarily-possible conclusion, and we have transformed into a nation of (even bigger) idiots.

Imagine taking a quirky person like Judge, sitting him and a few friends down with some pizza and beer (or maybe a few cases of Jolt Cola) and letting them spend a few days just riffing on the concept. What would our cities look like? What would we look like? What forms of entertainment would we pursue? How would our government be different? How might it be disturbingly similar? What would we eat, wear, watch, drive?

While this film does have an actual plot, it’s fairly thin and mostly just acts as a delivery device for a seemingly endless cornucopia of hilarious observations and gems of situational humor. I found myself busting out laughing every three to four minutes as a new gag was paraded before me. Cigarettes the size of Sharpie markers; dead-eyed Emergency Room nurses operating a giant keyboard covered in brightly-colored icons for every medical and psychological condition; Jet Skis churning up the water of the Reflecting Pool before a run down, slightly off-kilter Washington Monument. It’s endless, and it’s hilarious.

And yet, all three of us watching that night shared a compelling subterranean unease. Even as we guffawed at a US President who attained his office through victory at some sort of professional wrestling smackdown, we all felt the underlying message clearly: this isn’t as outlandish as it seems. We didn’t make this stuff up out of whole cloth; we distilled it from the essence of that which we see all around us.

As you watch the film, you feel this undercurrent of warning like some kind of subsonic rumble. You feel it as an icy finger sliding up your spine. You feel it as a tightness in your jaw even as you collapse in a paroxysm of giggles.

And you feel it when you look at your partner and are suffused with an irrational urge to drag her/him into the bedroom and start making babies. Quickly! Before all the whaoos up the street or on the 6 o’clock news or in the Wal-Marts beat you to it and out-progenize us all! Don’t just stand there, get busy!

Never before have I felt the urge to procreate to any degree like I did after watching Idiocracy. Fortunately, my limited attention span and media-impaired short-term memory allowed the impulse to quickly subside into the background noise of my standard, more selfish, less costly urges. So it’s back to coffee and geek toys for me. Whew! That was close. 😛

Go rent the movie; you’ll be glad you did, and that there may yet be time left to put a stop to the inevitable.